Bread is an American who talks about it best. Steven Kaplan, a historian born in Brooklyn in 1943, fell in love with the emblematic product of French bakeries while tasting a bâtard (a half-pound loaf, shorter than a baguette) in the Luxembourg Gardens in 1962. This encounter sealed his destiny. After decades of research and a CAP in baking, he is today the most learned scientist on the subject. He is also a tireless defender of crispy crusts and tasty crumbs, as he proves in his latest work in the form of a plea, For the bread (Fayard, 2020).
We thought that the inscription on November 30 of the baguette as a UNESCO heritage site would satisfy him… Wrong. For the historian, it adds to the confusion, by unifying under a generic term products of very unequal quality. And rehabilitates the industrial white baguette, which most of the time has no taste interest.
Were you surprised by the inscription of the baguette as a UNESCO heritage site?
No, because for many years I have been following the evolution of this dossier carried out by the National Confederation of French Bakery-Pastry and craftsmen’s unions. These unions, a bit losing momentum, first wanted to put forward the “traditional baguette”. The traditional baguette is not just anything, it is defined by a decree of September 13, 1993 determining in particular the ingredients that can be used in its preparation. Since 1993, a baker who prepares a tradition can no longer use a whole range of additives to cheat on taste and texture: for example, ascorbic acid was used to make the dough firmer, so pastilles of vitamin C to give the baguette a structure! The decree saved the artisan bakery, and brought bread back to taste.
Unesco does not include the “tradition baguette”, but the “bread baguette” on the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity…
And that’s a big difference! Unesco could not dub a specific product. By highlighting the baguette, without further precision, it distinguishes a know-how rooted in the past. But it also legitimizes, under this generic term, the commonly consumed white baguette, of generally very mediocre quality. Of the 6 billion baguettes that are consumed in France each year, there is a gulf between the traditional baguette, golden, crispy, often the result of a long fermentation, and the white one – the most consumed -, which is a product paradoxically dull, lacking in seduction and taste…
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